The Beverly Hills Hotel is Kim Kardashian's Cheers—except she's not exactly the Norm.

Kim grew up in a mansion just up the street, complete with a Bentley, a pool house, and all the Hollywood fixings. "We were really privileged," she admits, settling into a booth and ordering a chopped salad. "I'm on a diet," she says, looking glum but resolute. "I need to be. I love to eat—Kit Kats or cookies-and-cream ice cream. I need sugar like five times a day."

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Kim was recently in New York filming Kourtney & Kim Take New York with her older sister. "I worked out once. I gained like 10 pounds. All the papers were like, Kim's pregnant! I ate the nuts on the street corner, the hot dogs, the street meat. It was not a joke," she says, stabbing her salad with resignation.

Today Kim is in all black—sunglasses, saucy boots, her famous curves on display. But refreshingly, her face—so often covered with a counter's worth of product—is nearly makeup free. "I didn't have time to go home before this interview, and I was like, I have to go do my hair and makeup." She smiles with a level of bravado. "But I'm getting more comfortable not having a face full of makeup."

This is, quite literally, disarming. Under all of that product, Kim is a beautiful girl, her dark Armenian features a lesson in comely symmetry. So why so much spackle? "I do rely on having a full face on," she admits. "But I get that this"—she gestures to her face—"is more fashion. It's hard to let go. But then I think the glam can be my fashion. It's my own accessory." Like Lady Gaga and crazy shoes? "Yes! It's my crazy shoe."

Although she grew up just over the fence, Kim has come a long way. At 30, she is the star of her family's reality megashow, Keeping Up With the Kardashians (also starring sisters Kourtney, Khloé, Kylie, and Kendall, other halves Scott and Lamar, mother Kris, and stepfather Bruce Jenner), and executive producer of E!'s The Spin Crowd. She has the requisite book, perfume, and jewelry line. She promotes working out (with the Fit in Your Jeans by Friday exercise DVDs), during which you can wear Skechers (another client). If you want to look cute, pop on some Kim-endorsed LipFusion Infatuation. Then there's her Beach Bunny bikinis, which would look kind of hot with her ShoeDazzle shoes. Ask Kim how many endorsement products she can fit on her bedside table and she replies with a verbal wink, "All of them. LipFusion, Quick Trim ... and I have Skechers, a shoe on each side."

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Kim is an avatar of American consumerism. "Once I tweeted, 'Oh my God, I just tried a Golden Oreo. I've never in my life had something so amazing,'" she remembers. "Then Oreo sent me crates of them. To my door." She amuses herself: "Hmm, I like Bentleys, flat-screen TVs, diamonds. ..."

But for all of this, Kim is not a brat—and, in her own way, is weirdly relatable. She tends to speak of herself and her sisters as one being. "We have the glitz and the glam, and people want to live vicariously through it. Personally, though, I'm the first to say I have to work out extra hard, and it's such a struggle for me to eat healthy. I have sister issues and parent issues and all sorts of things."

Kim's is a particularly American, pre-recession kind of success—and its own strange power. For every person who says, "But what does she do?" there are 10 more online and outside her and her sisters' clothing store, Dash, in New York. "The city asked us not to tweet when we were there because the population growing around our store was becoming a fire hazard," Kim explains. (If each of her six million Twitter followers showed up, the same could be said of New York City.)

But Kim has always had a head for business (on top of that bod for sin). "I would absolutely characterize myself as ambitious," she says. She credits her late father, lawyer Robert Kardashian, who died of esophageal cancer in 2003, with instilling a work ethic in her. "I put myself on a budget. My parents raised us saying that at 18, we'd be cut off," she explains. So while "we had tennis lessons twice a week and we would complain about it," the girls were kept on a short leash: no going out on Saturday nights, and church on Sundays. "If we wanted this lifestyle, we had to work extra hard to get it. All of our friends had credit cards and cell phones, but that wasn't even a possibility."

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While Kim inherited her father's business gene, it took her a while to find her feet. A self-termed "pleaser," she got married at 19 to music producer Damon Thomas; they divorced in 2004. "I used to be so dependent on the guys I was in a relationship with. I don't know why, because I wasn't raised that way. If I looked at myself at 19, I would shake myself and be like, Wake up; you are way too smart for this." On her marriage, she says, "We went to Vegas, he said, 'Let's get married!' and I said"—she puts on a docile voice—"'Okay.'"

Kim maintains she's a changed woman. "As I've gotten older, I've learned so much from relationships. My tolerance level is so different. So after years of being in not the best relationships, you grow up."

When her father was diagnosed with cancer in 2003—dying only two months later—Kim and her sisters grew up fast. "For a while, we really thought he was going to be okay. And Dad told us he was fine. But then one day, when he was in chemo, the doctor told us, 'This is terminal.' So we learned how to take care of someone, having to feed them, all this stuff. The last thing Dad ever said to me was 'I know you're going to be okay. I'm not worried about you at all. But take care of your brothers and sisters.'"

Afterward, Kim started working as a stylist to clients like Brandy and Lindsay Lohan. She began dating Brandy's brother, singer Ray J, and made the ill-fated decision to film a sex tape, which later leaked. While her bedroom infamy catapulted Kim to a new level of stardom, it wasn't her finest hour. Recently, the Kardashians were spoofed on Saturday Night Live. "I heard!" Kim says with a grin. "That is so major, I don't even care what they said." Well, the skit had "Khloé" squealing, "My sister made a sex tape, and now my whole family's famous!" "Hmm. Well, it's SNL," Kim replies.

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"I never made a business off of the tape," she continues in the manner of one used to mounting a swift defense. "I made a business off my family and our TV show. Before the tape came out, we were in the works to do our TV show, but people don't know that. I thought there would be a lot of misconceptions about me, so it was not even a question that it had to be a family show." She's also quick to point out that she's not as "wild and crazy" as people might think. "I don't drink. I just started at 30. A white Russian. I hate the taste of alcohol. White Russians or Midori sours—that's it."

Kim had better things to do than get drunk anyway; she was busy ascending the celebrity ladder. She dived right into another relationship—with friend-since-preschool Paris Hilton. The ebony and ivory of socialites, they traveled the world, swanning around Australian beaches with Louis Vuitton handbags, doing photo-ops at Oktoberfest in dirndls. "We had so much fun," Kim says. "I had never traveled the world like that. It was so neat, all the things we did. I think I learned a lot from her."

But that was then. The two don't speak now, the popular perception being that Kim left Paris in the celebrity dust (Hilton's Twitter followers: 3.3 million). "We don't really talk. As I always say, everyone comes into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. And she was in my life for a long time." So Paris is so last season? She smiles. "I'll let you say it. There comes a point in life where you just grow apart and you realize you're not as similar as you thought. And I never run into her anywhere. Isn't that so weird?"

That's probably because Kim is never around. Her tweets read like those of a touring pop star: "Hello, New York, South Africa, Paris. I can't wait to get to Miami!" Mostly single since her breakup with football player Reggie Bush last year, she is careful not to complain about the constant cameras (her Faustian bargain, after all). But "what if I want to go on a date with someone in New York, and then I come home to L.A. and I go on a date? I could have slept with none of them, but I would be known as being"—she lowers her voice for gravitas—"a 'slore': a slut and a whore. But I'll do what I want. I have such a different outlook now."

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The fashion world's perception of Kim is evolving too. She understands that currently, her allure is more on the kitsch side than chic. "Yes," she agrees of her common perception, "but I also think I'm more accessible. I really do." Her taste is on the sexier side of high-low. "I love Céline. I love Givenchy. So edgy. Gucci is so classic. Spring was fantastic, all the colors. I wore Marchesa to the Emmys." The Emmys were kind to Kim. She had lent Glee's Lea Michele her compact, Michele squealing, "Kim Kardashian just let me use her compact!" on live television.

Kim tried Botox last year on the show. "All my friends had done it, and I was curious. But I saw such a change in what my face looked like. It didn't work for me. Someone told me yesterday that I needed it. That is so ridiculous."

She fields plastic-surgery questions all the time. "Some people say, 'You've definitely had your nose done.' If I had, I would say, 'Here's the doctor, he's amazing, and I'll make the appointment for you.' Sometimes I'll see pictures that say I've had my nose done, and the before pic is after the after." She attributes the nose debate to her favorite makeup trick, contouring. "Someone saw me last night and my nose was so contoured. And they were like, 'You've had your nose done?' And I was like, 'No, wait until I wash my face.'"

Kim's next incarnation: pop singer. She recently filmed her first music video with Kanye West, tweeting pictures of herself with Bo Derek braids. "I can carry a tune, yeah. I have a cute little voice. I talked to people in the business, and they said, 'This is what we do for fun. You go to the movies, you go shopping, why don't you try what we do?'" And with no less than West as a collaborator, Kim might yet be a hit. Has Kanye ever come courting? She smiles again. "We are good friends."

Kim is clearly doing something right. "Everything is better with a K," she says emphatically, owning her irony. "Klassy with a K—har, har, har. But life is funner with a K."

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